pantoum's Diaryland
Diary
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THE DISAPPEARED
Continuing my earlier riff about the disappeared and shiny happy people..... Carolyn Forché identifies herself as a poet of witness. She says I have been told that a poet should be of his or her own time. It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness. This is not accomplished without certain difficulties. If I did not wish to make poetry of what I had seen, what is it I thought poetry was?
Gathering The Tribes (1976), her first collection, won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The Country between Us (1982), a volume that focused on the civil war in El Salvador during the 1970s, won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. This prize, which Minnie Bruce Pratt also won for Crimes against Nature, recognizes the best second book of poetry published in the US. Her other books include the prescient landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which she edited, and The Angel of History (1994).
She read this poem when she visited my undergraduate English program. RETURN by Carolyn Forché from The Country between Us—for Josephine Crum Upon my return to America, Josephine the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving like lean women. I was afraid more than I had been, even of motels so much so that for nine months every tire blow-out was final, every strange car near the house kept watch and I strained even to remember things impossible to forget. You took my stories apart for hours, sitting on your sofa with your legs under you and fifty years in your face. So you know now, you said, what kind of money is involved and that campesinos knife one another and you know you should not trust anyone and so you find a few people you will trust. You know the mix of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue that costs hundreds of deaths. You've seen the pits where men and women are kept the few days it takes without food and water. You've heard the cocktail conversation on which their release depends. So you've come to understand why men and women of good will read torture reports with fascination. Such things as water pumps and co-op farms are of little importance and take years. It is not Ché Guevara, this struggle. Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara was rounded up with the others, and José Martí is a landing strip for planes from Miami to Cuba. Go try on Americans your long, dull story of corruption, but better to give them what they want: Li'l Milagro Ramirez, who after years of confinement did not know what year it was, how she walked with help and was forced to shit in public. Tell them about the razor, the live wire, Dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all Who fucked her, how many times and when. Tell them about retaliation: José lying on the flat bed truck, waving his stumps in your face, his hands cut off by his captors and thrown to the many acres of cotton, lost, still, and holding the last few lumps of leeched earth. Tell them of José in his last few hours and later how, many months earlier, a labor leader was cut to pieced and buried. Tell them how his friends found the soldiers and made them dig him up and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once it was assembled again on the ground like a man. As for the cars, of course they watch you and for this don't flatter yourself. We are all watched. We are all assembled. Josephine, I tell you I have not rested, not since I drove those streets with a gun in my lap, not since all manner of speaking has failed and the remnant of my life continues onward. I go mad, for example, in the Safeway, at the many heads of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples and coffee, especially the coffee. And when I speak with American men, there is some absence of recognition: their constant Scotch and fine white hands, many hours of business, penises hardened by motor inns and a faint resemblance to their wives. I cannot keep going. I remember the American attaché in that country: his tanks of fish, his clicking pen, his rapt devotion to reports. His wife wrote his reports. She said as much as she gathered him each day from the embassy compound, that she was tired of covering up, sick of drinking and the loss of his last promotion. She was a woman who flew her own plane, stalling out after four martinis to taxi on an empty field in the campo and to those men and women announce she was there to help. She flew where she pleased in that country With her drunken kindness, while Marines In white gloves were assigned to protect Her husband. It was difficult work, what With the suspicion on the rise in smaller countries that gringos die like other men. I cannot, Josephine, talk to them, And so, you say, you've learned a little about starvation: a child like a supper scrap filling with worms, many children strung together, as if they were cut from paper and all in a delicate chain. And that people who rescue physicians, lawyers and poets lie in their beds at night with reports of mice introduced into women, of men whose testicles are crushed like eggs. Then they cup their own parts with their bed sheets and move themselves slowly, imagining bracelets affixing their wrists to a wall where the naked are pinned, where the naked are tied open and left to the hands of those who erase what they touch. We are all erased by them, and no longer resemble decent men. We no longer heave the hearts, the strength, the lives of women. Your problem is not your life as it is in America, not that your hands, as you tell me, are trying to do something. It is that you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others. It is not your right to feel powerless. You have not returned to your country, but to a life you never left. • Those last three lines remind me of Audre Lorde, admonishing American women to ask ourselves How We Are Using Our Power. • And, now that I know that Pottergrrl has Friday off, I am feeling such a horrible stomach bug coming on and simply must call in tomorrow.
7:42 p.m. - 2005-07-28
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